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American Judaism American Judaism: A History by Jonathan Sarna Yale Univ. Press, 2004 512 pp., $35

Jonathan Sarna is among the leading historians of Judaism in America, and perhaps the most able in placing the Jewish experience into the larger American experience. This book was ten years in the making. Half way through, the author had to battle cancer, so it is some kind of miracle that the book exists at all. We should be grateful for Sarna's recovery, because this book—issued on the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the first Jews to come to America—belongs on the small shelf of outstanding books on American religion that have appeared over the past 15 years.

When the Jewish community of greater Boston wanted to honor Sarna (who teaches at Brandeis) and his book, they gathered a star-studded panel at Temple Keihillath Israel in Brookline, located at the top of the road where one finds the John F. Kennedy birthplace. I warmed to the thought of that event because Keihillath Israel was "my" synagogue growing up. Not that I was a member—my family was Christian—but everyday on the way to my school across the street I passed "Temple KI," as we called it. I was in and out of KI all the time as a kid. I often walked with my neighborhood friends to shul after our baseball games when they had their biweekly Hebrew lessons in preparation for their Bar Mitzvah. I attended several Bar Mitzvahs at KI. The rabbi called me "the good gentile friend" of his students. Around the Jewish Thanksgiving (Succoth) the rabbi sometimes saw to it that I received some nice candy. So it was with great personal warmth of recollection that I imagined the celebration at Keihillath Israel of Sarna's achievement.

And an achievement it is. The breadth of scholarship displayed here is immense, yet the prose is accessible. The sources used, both literary and quantitative, are extensive, and a lesser writer might have gotten bogged down in them. There is a further achievement worth mentioning. Early on the author says he writes as both an insider and as a scholar: "I have endeavored to balance my passionate Jewish commitments with my dispassionate scholarly ones." As believer and as critic Sarna repeatedly focuses clearly on important historical and contemporary issues. But, just when the text might have become apologetical, Sarna backs off and gives readers interpretive tools and options, encouraging us to think for ourselves.

The author's general orientation gladly honors the style of his teacher at Yale, Sydney Ahlstrom, who saw all denominations and religious groups as part of "the great tradition of American churches." In the American context, then, there are certain overarching social and cultural questions that would have great impact on all religious groups: with no exclusive privilege given to any religious group, all would have to compete for adherents in a religious market economy unknown to Europeans; with no leader acknowledged by the state, there could be no version of the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Chief Rabbi of England, so authority patterns would be democratic; with massive waves of immigration, all churches and groups reeled, sometimes recoiled, from the competing desires of ethnically varied co-religionists.

While Sarna's subject is Judaism's varied experience in the new world, he nevertheless sees the essential context of the larger Protestant culture. He likens the Jewish difficulties with differing ethnicities to the problems that "rattled" Protestantism in America. Sarna sees the essence of the Protestant quest for identity formulated in negative terms (they weren't Catholics) and relates it to the Jewish identity quest (they weren't Christians). Moreover, by the 1880s, Jewish spirituality was like its Protestant counterpart in that it had been "feminized." And again like the Protestants, Jewish "denominations" would divide in the 20th century under the pressures of modernity. Jews even borrowed directly from Protestants: wanting to hold their youth, and noting the success of "Christian Endeavor," religious leaders founded "Jewish Endeavor." In sum, Sarna's history in the Ahlstrom manner is a work in American religious and cultural history in which Jews are the subject matter. The underlying motif is the way in which the market revolution after, say, 1840, forced Jews into a religious situation for which there had been no preparation in two millennia of Jewish life and thought. From concentration in a few states, the expanding economy made Judaism a national, not merely regional, faith. Jews responded well to the religious aspects of the free market with an attraction to free will, as did their Arminian neighbors, the Methodists and the Baptists.

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